Thursday 25 June 2009 08.38 EDT
First published on Thursday 25 June 2009 08.38 EDT

Until a few months ago, when the ghastly return of lymphatic cancer again pinned him to his hospital bed, Steven Wells would send me a weekly email detailing the five or six ideas swirling around his brain. Most of them would journey chaotically through side streets and back alleys, all-too-often taking in man's latent fear of homosexuality or class conflict before, after a violent handbrake turn, somehow coming together in the final paragraph. It wasn't exactly a typical sports journalist pitch but, like his column, you always wanted to read on - even when you didn't quite buy the idea.

Despite his fiery, come-and-have-go reputation, Steven was never a problem to deal with. He rarely complained when a piece he'd sent in on spec was swatted aside, or when subs or lawyers hacksawed his scribblings. Indeed, after we published his piece on the-then 16-year-old Wayne Rooney (part of which you can read below) he rang the desk up to tell us it was the "best piece of subbing he'd ever seen". Probably because we hadn't touched a word as it was so good.

What follows is a small selection of his writing for our sports site. He will be sorely missed by everyone who read him, and everyone who grew up wanting to write like him. RIP, Swells.

"The most disgusting thing I've ever heard on the radio was this explorer type recalling how he and his chum got a bit peckish up the Amazon one day and so decided to off a crocodile-like beast called a broad-snouted caiman. So they popped a cap in the mother's ass and dragged the corpse to the shore. Where it twitched.

"So they cut the head off with a chainsaw. And still it twitched.

"So they hauled the brute up and started to skin it. But every time the knife made contact with the scaly skin, the decapitated monster scratched desperately at the wound with one of its hideous claws. So - with mounting horror - they whipped out the chainsaw and carved the beast into handy kebab-sized chunks. And guess what? Yes, that's right - every single steaming piece of freshly butchered flesh carried on twitching!

" I can't help thinking about that monster every time I gaze upon the face of young Wayne Rooney.

"Look at his eyes! Have you ever seen deader eyes? Even on a dead person? Even on, like, a dead person with no eyes? They say that the eyes are the windows of the soul - but looking into Wayne Rooney's reptilian pits is like staring into Nietzsche's abyss. There is no humanity there, or compassion. There's only the message, beamed loud and clear: "I outlived the dinosaurs and I will outlive your kind too, human. And my offspring will lay their eggs in your children's flesh-stripped bones. Now come a bit nearer the water's edge so I can bite yer frickin' legs off."

"Refs are like traffic wardens — incredibly valuable public servants who are soft targets of a dumb, unthinking sheep-like consensus. And just as traffic wardens perform a vital task in keeping the planet-raping speedophile car filth in check, so referees are crucial to the very existence of the sport.

"That's why I cringe whenever I hear some triple-chinned has-been former red-card magnet deride a ref for 'thinking he's the most important person on the pitch'. The ref is the most important person on the pitch — the most important person in the entire sport.

"Undermine the authority of the ref and the entire structure of the sport collapses. And what rushes to fill the vacuum? The Corinthian values of the millionaire brats who play the game? The free-market amorality of the owners? The bumbling blazered bureaucracy? Only the referee remains pure of motive and entirely dedicated to the fundamentals of the game.

"Which is why the Respect campaign doesn't go far enough. The referee should be omnipotent and beyond question. Even when the ref is wrong — totally wrong, magnificently wrong, egregiously, almost-certainly-been-bribed catastrophically wrong — the ref is right. We need to instill a culture where to challenge a ref's authority is considered the sporting equivalent of picking one's nose in front the Queen.

"We should tool the refs up ... with tasers. Let's make the players wear undergarments laced with a filigree of superconductive wiring. One word of dissent, one raised eyebrow, the slightest suggestion of a smirk, one tiny gesture of sarcastic applause and the offending player is dealt a brief but instructive agony. This could be particularly effective with those players feigning injury. Bzzzzzzt! Get up. Bzzzzzzzzt! Get up. Repeat as needed."

"But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Respect needs to start in the commentary box and the backpages of the tabloids. All you old lags, all you wannabe Motsons, all you catcalling conveyers of cowardly consensus — show some respect for the game and shut your stupid mouths. The damage you do to the very fabric of the sport every time you undermine the ref is incalculable."

"US sports are ruined by attention-span-wrecking, tacky, plastic, pre-packaged razzmatazz. A while back I went to watch the Philadelphia 76ers. Within a few minutes I was starting to get a feel for the rhythm of live basketball, noting how a little chap called Allen Iverson repeatedly used his brain as much as his body to outfox players who loomed over him. I was thinking what a great soccer midfielder he'd make. A Maradona with hands. Then, suddenly, I wasn't thinking anything at all. I was watching dancing girls.

"This set the pattern for the rest of evening. A few minutes of basketball sandwiched between go-go dancers, a Frisbee-catching dog, time-outs, free T-shirts, irritatingly short blasts of music, distracting scoreboard graphics and Hip Hop the Rabbit's amazing guys-in-fat-suits sumo wrestling competition.

"The audience, for the most part, sat still and listless. The few fans that did chant were drowned out by the PA system. It was if there was a morbid fear that - if allowed to actually watch the sport - the audience might become bored.

"This moronic circus has all but killed fan culture. What's amazing is that it hasn't killed the sports themselves. Watching a game is like watching a great Shakespearean drama dumbed down to the soundbites. The great moments that emerge from fluid, open play and the interplay of fatigue, instinct and technique are lost. And the near-hypnotic state of focused concentration that defines the truly great fan experience is denied the American fan.

"But the greatest horror is that, after decades of being treated like sugar-stoned two-year-olds, entire generations of fans have grown up thinking this brain-frying farce is normal.

"The history of the modern Olympic movement is one long, sad litany of imperialism, racism, exploitation and oppression. But that's not why I think we should boycott the Olympics. And I do think we should boycott them. Not just the Beijing games. All of them. Forever. Why? Because of the total disconnect between what the Olympics are supposed to be about (grace, beauty, athleticism, sportsmanship, solidarity, brotherhood and the human spirit) and the sordid reality — as superbly illustrated by what the preparations for the 2012 London games are doing to the Manor Garden allotments.

"Ask yourself this question: are the drug-riddled, debased and corrupt Olympics worth the demolition of a single 80-year-old community institution that genuinely and continually promotes health, mental wellbeing, exercise, neighbourliness and fresh vegetables? And (while we're at it) was it worth ripping up the much-loved and heavily used five-a-side football pitches in East London's Spitalfields market just so the City of London could have yet another identikit shopping/office development? (If you answered yes to either question, stop reading and trot off and fellate a stockbroker, you dominant ideology humping Tory bastard).

"Don't get me wrong. I dislike cockney gardeners just as much as the next professional Northern bigot ... but when I see our socialist heritage of collective gardening trampled underfoot by the size-900 Adidas bovver sneakers of soulless corporate sport, I'm there on the front line, jabbing at the scaly, baby-eating, corn-syrup spewing monstrosity with a dung-smeared pitchfork, glotally whining in my best Thames Estuary accented sub-English: Bugger off back to whichever focus-group driven hell spawned you, Nikezilla. Ils ne passeront pas, me old cock sparrer, ils ne passeront bleedin' pas.

"What are these Olympics anyway? Every square inch of its corporate jism-soaked soul is fully owned by one crap-peddling multinational monster or another. And all the major events are dominated by freakish, faceless, unreal, disconnected, socially-crippled identikit meta-humans, most (if not all) of them as keenly engaged in an ever-escalating techno-war with the drug testers as they are in actually running, jumping or throwing stuff.

"Why should I cheer these freaks on? Because they supposedly represent the patch of dirt I was born on? Is it not absurd that an event so wedded to the increasingly redundant 18th-century notion of the nation state should be owned lock, stock and logo-plastered barrel by nationless corporations, all of whom automatically shift production to anywhere the grateful peasants will work for a dollar a day (and all the rice and rat meat they can eat) at the drop of a spread sheet?

"The fact is that we have irrevocably lost the Olympics to the dumb, piggish maelstrom of corruption, blind self-interest, amorality, blandness, hypocrisy and lowest-common-denominator aesthetics that is corporate capitalism. And no amount of hand wringing or faux-nostalgic bleating about Corinthian values is ever going to bring it back.

"... When the corporations start to sniff around the edges of these events (as they already do, the bastards) we should kvetch like billy-o. No, not because it'll do any good, but because not to do so means to accept cultural brain-death, to become sports Tories, to march in corporate sponsored official replica shirt-wearing lockstep into a new serfdom where our only functions are to slave and consume.

"I give you the NFL, the NBA, the Premier League and every other professional league on the planet, all of them to a greater or lesser degree on the slippery slope to soulless shut-up-and-consume McSports status"

"[The] real reason why real baseball fans hate steroids [is] because steroids render the statistics meaningless. And without the stats, baseball becomes mere entertainment. Except that it doesn't. And there's the crunch. Modern baseball is only slightly more exciting that snail racing. To watch baseball live is to watch a sport dying. Huge crowds sit almost comatose, despite the bursts of rock'n'roll hammering out of the PA and the exhortations to 'Make Some Noise' flashed on the scoreboard. Attempts to generate excitement might include a T-shirt catapult, a hot dog cannon or a lottery with a giant bar of chocolate as a prize. But the crowds just sit there - not singing or chanting or cheering - bored catatonic and paying through the nose for the privilege (a family of four can expect to fork out $276 to watch a Boston Red Sox game - and that's not including money for gas).

"A typical baseball innings goes something like this. The pitcher stands immobile on his mound, glancing sideways occasionally to check if anyone's trying to steal a base. This goes on for some time. After an eternity he pitches. The batter swings. And nearly always misses. Or he hits the ball behind the diamond. Which doesn't count. Or he whacks the ball, gets caught and is out. This is repeated (very slowly) again and again and again until three batters are out. Which is when a good proportion of the crowd scramble from their seats and try desperately hard to get drunk on $6-a-pop watered-down pseudo-beer.